Every year the same problem... what to buy for her birthday. While standing in line at the bakery, I started a GitHub Issue. By the time I got back to my desk, a fancy html overview was published to my GitHub Pages with a fallback to the dry markdown research. In there was this gem " Hunt A Killer: a six-month serialized murder-mystery " (she'll love that)!

I built Scout , a MIT open-source research engine that runs Claude Code on your hardware and takes your one-line topic from a GitHub Issue to a cited markdown on a site you own. This post is about the four design decisions that made it actually useful, not just a demo.

The pain

I wanted a research loop that fits the way ideas arrive.

Most of my research curiosities show up on a phone — on a train, in line, mid-conversation. I'd then act on the result at my desk, often inside a Claude Code session, using the research as context for whatever I'm building.…